The Devils Harvest: The End of All Flesh. (12 page)

I rolled over on to my back. The sun streamed through the thick beige curtains. Dust particles wafted around the hazy room after being stirred airborne by my moving body.

Looking across to my alarm clock I noticed it read 3:46 P.M.

I bolted upright in bed, with the sheets still wrapped a round my neck. Shit! I kept doing this. I never slept past eight. Not until after he started visiting me.
Maybe he was in someway causing a drain of my energies?
I had no idea. But there had to be an answer. It wasn’t as if I was over doing it. I simply wait around all day until he arrived. Most of the time I couldn’t even remember what I had been doing, but something always seemed to come along to draw my attention away from that fact.

Another day almost wasted. And what about the strange dreams I’ve been having, waking up covered in a cold sticky sweat with my hair plastered to my face.

I threw the sheets to one side and just sat there dumfounded, my eyes wide staring in horror. The inside of the sheets were saturated in blood! My head was now spinning. I swallowed back the bile, stopping myself from vomiting. The room started to spin. I felt like my head was inside a washing machine. I snapped my eyes open only to see that my clothes were soaked, too. My hands wet and sticky, hair plastered to my ashen face, but this time it was blood not sweat.

I rolled to the side. Too late. I vomited loudly over the side of the bed, hitting my bedside table and smothering my alarm clock.

Jumping out of bed I moved across to my bathroom, pulling my clothes off and throwing them to the floor. I vomited once again into the toilet. I leant there, naked, one hand resting on the sink to steady myself, the other running over my stubble covered face. More vomit. Then a dry retch that made pains shoot through my abdomen. There was nothing left to come up.

I fell to my knees on to the cold tiled floor. Another dry retch followed by several more in quick succession, each longer and more painful than the last. I turned the tap on next to my head and tipped the toothbrush and toothpaste into the sink, then filled the dirty glass with water. I had to drink it. I had to put something into my stomach to stop the retching, just to put something in there so it could come back out.

My head was swimming, not being able to make sense of everything that was happening.

Where had the blood come from? And more importantly whose blood?

My eyes pealed open and I was rewarded with the sight staring back up at me from down the toilet. I went to close them again. The last thing I needed to see was what I had recently eaten. But looking down I didn’t see cooked chewed meat, rather, I saw ripped chucks of pinky raw flesh, small red tubes and thick purple veins. I retched again; cloudy water pouring from me faster than it came from the tap. I looked like the girl from
The Exorcist
. More retching. Eyes closed. Strange animalistic cries rising from my gut, trying to force something out that wasn’t there. I sounded like a moose in rutting season.

I couldn’t look back down the toilet. I reached up and pulled the flush. Hoping that if I flushed it away I could also flush away the memory of it. I sat with my head forward; splashes from the flushing water sprinkled my hot face. But the image remained, like a blown up still freeze-frame photo.

I rolled back onto my heels; sweat now covering my body, running into my eyes stinging them. I spat bile into the toilet and tried to raise myself to my unsteady feet. Stomach aching, as if I had been hit in the gut several times by a heavy weight boxer.

Bloody smears were now everywhere. On the floor – making the tiles slippery – on the tap and flush handle and splattered all up the wall were I had thrown my sodden clothes.

I ignored it all and climbed into the shower. Fast piping hot water scolding my body, as I sat curled up in a ball in the bath, holding my knees tight against my pounding chest and aching stomach.

I had no idea how long I sat there, head down, eyes closed tight. But it felt like an eternity before I could bring myself to clean up the mess around me.

I bundled all the bed sheets together as well as my clothes and towels that I had used to clean the floor.

It was so messy. So much blood.

I knew the average body held eight pints of blood. And I also knew that it always looked more than it was. Like spilling a glass of water on a tiled floor. While cleaning it up you would have sworn the mess was made by a bucket.

After I had shoved all the stuff into the washing machine I had to return upstairs to have another shower.

This time I lay in the bath with the powerful spray bouncing off my body.

I closed my eyes, not daring to think what had happened. My brain doing its usual job of blocking everything out. So unhealthy my shrink – turned wife – used to say.

Funny, I had heard not too long ago from one of my American friends via e-mail, that she was entangled in a lawsuit; by a patient that followed her advise. She had told him to vent his anger in a controlled manner. He had then returned home and bludgeoned his wife and two daughters, and even his dog, to death with a broken chair leg. She is also facing criminal charges as well as disbarment by the Control Board over her unusual methods, because the man claimed she had told him to do it.

The next thing I knew I was still laid out in the bath, but the water coming from the showerhead was stone cold, having been laying there for so long I had run the hot water tank dry. I shook the cold water from my body.

I had fallen asleep in the shower.
Shit, I’m becoming a wreck.

I towelled down. With the towel wrapped tightly around my head I made my way back to the bedroom. I rubbed my hair dry, looking out through the small gaps as the towel swam over my face.

No it can’t be!
The towel drop from my hands to the carpet. My bed had been made. The sheets were the way I had left them this morning. No blood, it had all been cleaned up.
Hadn’t I put them in the washing machine?
How long had I been in the shower? Had I gone back down stairs and removed the sheets from the machine
– that was set to dry after it had completed the washing cycle –
and remade the bed?

No sick covered the alarm clock that was sat where it always sat. The time now 8:13 P.M. Over four hours had gone! Gone where?

I fell forwards, my mind blanking out from what it was trying to figure out.

But the last thing I remember before blanking out was,
I am going mad? He’s making me go mad. Was being in the presences of such evil causing me ill effects? Was he sucking the very life from my body?

A loud banging awoke me from my fainting fit. The sound originating from my front door. I had never fainted in my whole life. I though only women fainted? Typical male perspective.

I pulled my robe around me one more time, before heading down to the door. Already having made up my mind to give him a good shouting at, and demand to know what he was doing to me.

He obviously already knew what I was about to do. That’s probably why he picked whom he did, to throw me of balance.

A Gift

I
stood in front of the banging door while trying to put my thoughts into some sort of order. Reaching down I pulled hard, swinging the door open to its limit. It hit hard against a tall table that stood beside it, where my trucks keys rested in a small Bamyam bowl. The colourful bowl upturned smashing on the wooden floor, the keys skidding along hitting the back of the couch.

“That’s some temper you have there mate,” came the voice of a teenager who stood leaning against the door post. A cigarette already hanging from the corner of his mouth, smoke trailing out his nostrils. He was dressed in faded jeans with rips at the knees. A zip-up cream coloured sweat top with the hood sprawled down the back, zip open at the front displaying a khaki T-shirt with the cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez on it, who was smoking a joint, with the words,
slow down and relax a little.
His hair was light brown and tied in a tight ponytail at the back. And acne that a warthog would be jealous of.

I stumbled five or six steps backwards, missing the back of the couch with my out stretched hand and fell to my knees, landing hard, knocking the wind from my lungs. My eyes were watering, tears running down my cheeks blurring my vision. I grabbed at my head, trying to stop the pounding noise that was echoing loudly around inside my throbbing skull.

Standing in front of me was my oldest nephew, the son of my dead brother. Now his son had gone and joined him.

He walked past after gently shutting the door. He gave me a sideways glance on the way towards the chair.

“You wanna put more water with it, mate,” came his familiar voice and the laugh I was all too familiar with, but now it seemed dark and vile – tainted.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my hand hard over my face, smearing tears and runny snot into my hair.

My own nephew, all I had left from my bother, was now dead. All my hatred for this being had drained away. I sat grieving. But then all the anger came rushing back like adrenalin. My own fucking nephew! I stood in one liquid motion and made my way towards the two high back chairs that faced each other. One already occupied.

Then I saw him sat there, sat the way he always did, one leg crossed over the other while leaning back in the seat. When I saw his image again all my anger melted away, my eyes filled with tears once more. I covered them, slumping into the seat opposite, like a puppet that had just had its strings cut.

“I thought you would be happy to see this body again.” He motioned with the thin white hands, before pushing them into the large baggy pockets on his sweat-top. A top I had brought him many years ago, which for some reason had
CUBA
, written across the front – two letters on either side of the zip – even though I had bought in from a shop in Exeter, a city just down the road.

“Happy!” I blurted. “How could I be fucking happy?” I stood up again. Anger rising up in me because of his words, because of his pompousness.

His hand rose stopping me mid-stride. I didn’t know what I was going to do, or even if I could do anything to him. But I was about to try. Anger was filling me with strength, turning me half crazy.

But I was held in his invisible grasp.

He relaxed his hand, putting it back to his face and removing the cigarette so he could talk. “Do you know what the date is?”

I was confused.
What’s the fucking date got to do with anything?

“It’s the twenty-third of January.” He let those words sink in.

“Twenty-third?” I muttered. No way, it couldn’t be. Realization dawned on me. The fourth anniversary of my brother’s death.

I always spent that day with my nephew because of the way he had taken the news all those years ago. The look on his face. I knew from that date on, each year I would have to spend it with him, so he wouldn’t do something stupid. And now he obviously had. The corpse sat in front of me was testimony to that horrid fact.

He released whatever was holding me. I fell into the chair like a sack of potatoes. My hands came up to my face, but this time they were fists pressing hard against my forehead.

After everything that had happened to me over the last five days, I had completely forgotten all about the twenty-third.

“W-w-what happened?” I stuttered.

The grin returned, twisting the sides of his mouth way beyond there humanly normal limit, giving him the resemblance of Lewis Carroll’s depiction of the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Or maybe Tim Burton’s creation did it more justice – darker, more menacing.

“Tablets and beer,” he said matter-of-fact. “You’d be surprised at how little it takes to overdose,” he said tipping the cigarette backwards, pretending it was a bottle of pills. “Like I said, I thought you would be happy to see him one more time.

“Unlike most nights you would be surprised at the amount of bodies I could have picked from.” He started ticking off his fingers one at a time. “A thirteen year old boy, who though grinding down a rail on a steep set of steps was a good idea.
Snap!
A man who thought using a couple of logs, instead of a car jack, would be sufficient.
Squish!
An eight-six year old woman who just wanted one more cigarette before bed, and fell asleep with it between her fingers. You gotta love polyester sheets.
Whoosh!
A twenty-three year old driver who nodded off and hit a truck head on.
Splat!
” He motioned both hands at himself. “I chose this one for you. A gift, because of all the things you have been doing for me… Your welcome.”

I sat open-mouthed, tears flowing freely, not caring how I looked. I stared at my nephew. Only a teenager. Eighteen. Eight-fucking-teen.

A whole world and life had been waiting for him. I had let him down and now he sat in front of me, his life already long gone, drained away by paracetamol and Budweiser and most probably accompanied by the loud droning music he so loved. I hated that sort of music, but I respected his choices. I had even brought him some CD’s. Had one of the ones I had brought him been the last thing he had ever heard? Probably not, most of his music came from illegal downloads.

I stood, not being able to look at him anymore. I walked over to the drinks cabinet. Vodka straight from the bottle, one long gulping swig. I slammed it down hard on to the Mexican silver tray – which I had brought from Coyoacán market in Mexico City – up turning several other bottles in the process. I ignored them as they rolled to the sideboards edge and fell to the floor, shattering in a sticky display that was now slowly being soaked up by one of my numerous rugs.